Japanese negotiators traveled Tuesday to North Korea to discuss a dispute over the communist country's kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, as calls grow in Tokyo to use economic sanctions to push the talks forward.
Japan wants North Korea to explain what happened to eight kidnapped Japanese who North Korea says died in the North, and to two others Tokyo alleges were abducted. Five other Japanese kidnapped by North Korea were allowed to return to Japan in 2002.
Tokyo will also question the North about dozens of other Japanese it believes may have been abducted to train Northern spies in Japanese language and customs, or to provide them with Japanese identities.
Two previous rounds of talks, held in August and September in Beijing, ended without progress, prompting Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura to accuse North Korea of being insincere and say Tokyo could use economic sanctions to prod a better response.
The two sides were to hold a preparatory meeting after the Japanese delegation arrived in the North Korean capital, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said yesterday. More substantive discussions will be held today, he added. The talks were scheduled to end on Friday.
"Today and tomorrow we'll be able to tell basically what North Korea is thinking and what its attitude will be," Hosoda told a news conference.
Japan expects North Korea to report on an investigation into the whereabouts of the missing Japanese. The Japanese delegation, which includes police experts, will then verify the information, Hosoda said.
Delegation head Mitoji Yabunaka told reporters in Beijing before boarding a plane for Pyongyang that he hoped to speak directly to the head of the North Korean task force investigating what happened to the kidnapped.
"Our team will unite together to find out the truth," Yabunaka said in remarks broadcast on Japanese television.
The national Mainichi newspaper said in an editorial yesterday that proposals to slap economic sanctions on the North will gain momentum in Japan if the talks don't address Japanese concerns.
"North Korea should realize that if there continues to be no solution to the abduction issue, then calls for sanctions will grow not just in the Liberal Democratic Party but also among the Japanese people," the Mainichi said.
A poll by the Yomiuri, another national newspaper, in September showed 68 percent of voters believed Japan should impose sanctions on North Korea if the abduction talks drag on without progress.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2002 that his country kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.
Japanese officials, however, say mysterious circumstances surrounding the alleged deaths of eight victims raise doubts about North Korea's claims.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS